The First Marvel Fatality

If there’s one thing that’s become apparent over the past 80 years of comic book publishing, it’s that death sells. The demise of a beloved character can create great interest in a series, as well as potentially delivering an emotional impact that the audience will remember. The whole job of storytelling is to evoke a response from the receiver, and death is one of only two experience that every person will face during the course of their lives. By the 1980s, it became a commercial move to kill off a popular character and then either replace them with somebody new in the role or simply note the hole their absence leaves behind; on certain occasions, you’d get both.

Among other things, one of the selling points of the brand new Marvel Comics Group was that it attempted to create a more plausible sense of reality in its titles than the competition. The stories typically took place in real world settings, the power levels of the assorted heroes weren’t quite as outlandish as other super heroes, there was an emphasis on individual personalities for the characters (even if those personalities were relatively thin.) Early on, and for many years well into the start of the 1980s, Marvel’s reputation concerning death was that it approached it seriously. Whenever a major character died, hero or villain, that death was meant to be permanent and eternal. (This is not to be confused with “super-villain deaths”, those issues that ended with a villain falling off a pier, their body never recovered but presumed dead. Those were simply a convenient way around the Comics Code provision that evil could in no way triumph while allowing the character to remain at liberty for some future story.)

This reputation was earned by the manner in which Marvel treated most of their character deaths up until a certain point. But where did it start? Well, the very first death of a main character took place in SGT FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS #4. As a war title, perhaps this seemed like an inevitability. After all, for all of the times Fury and his Howlers waded into enemy action, it would be totally unrealistic that none of them would ever get hurt, right? Even this early on, the choice was made to show that the Howlers weren’t indestructible, and that every time they went on a mission, the jeopardy was real. This development was so noteworthy that editor Stan Lee blurbs it on the cover to this issue.

The Howlers themselves were a pretty diverse bunch for the era, reflecting Jack Kirby’s experiences both during the war and after it. The Howlers were even an integrated unit, with Gabe Jones being the first heroic character of color to be featured in the Marvel line. The Howlers came from all different backgrounds and social strata in the manner of Kirby’s earlier Boy Commandos, but they were united in their hatred of the Nazi cause and their love of a good fight. Among that initial composition of characters was John “Junior” Juniper, an Ivy League scholar who looked young for his age, hence his nickname.

And in all honesty, the choice to bump off Junior feels like a last minute impulse to me, given that it happens on Page 21 of a 22 page story with no real foreshadowing. Consequently, it is appropriately shocking, especially for a comic book published in 1963. In those days, by and large, the good guys didn’t get killed in stories such as this. And in fact, Lee and Kirby have to dance around things a bit due to teh Code; they can never outright say that Júnior has been killed. Whether this was something that Kirby had planned all along or was something he or Lee thought up partway through the issue, the event hits like a thunderbolt, and would reverberate through the next couple of issues, where Fury would carry the weight of Junior’s death and the unit would receive replacements to fill his open position. Likely, he was chosen due to the fact that he wasn’t as colorful or individual as the other Howlers–he was the easiest character to miss.

What’s even more remarkable is the fact that, in all the years since, Junior Juniper has never been brought back. There haven’t been any embittered relatives going after Nick Fury for revenge, no shocking revelation that Junior was somehow still alive and working undercover. No, he was dead, and he stayed dead, one of the few comic book characters to truly do so. He’s mostly been forgotten now, as all of his appearances were in comic books that are now sixty years old, but his position remains unassailable. He was the first fatality of the Marvel Age.